My home village, Churchdown, has become the centre of a media storm. Blowing in from middle England this storm is causing lasting damage. Not just to Britain’s poorest families but to each and every one of us.

Just round the corner from the Hare and Hounds in Churchdown, one of my old haunts, lives Heather Frost. Heather is unemployed and is currently living in temporary council accommodation with her 11 children.

Cue the tabloid hysteria…

The Sun reports “A JOBLESS mum on benefits is having a £400,000 council house built for her — and her brood of ELEVEN children”

The Daily Mail goes with, “mother of 11 to get six-bedroom eco-house after moaning her TWO council homes are cramped”

While The Express analysed the events saying, “The result has instead been to create powerful incentives for irresponsible people to bring into the world very large numbers of children they cannot possibly support”

I am not here to argue the morality of having 11 children, but to comment on the media storm surrounding this story.

I hope to show how it’s inaccuracies and how it causes lasting damage not just to some of the poorest in our society but to each and every one of us.

So where to start in this quagmire of misinformation?

Virtually all media reporting of the story goes to great length to try and generalise Heather’s quite extraordinary story into an attack on our benefits system in general. The Daily Mail reports that there are over 190 families with more than 10 children and this is costing us, the taxpayer, over £11 million a year.

Of course, what the Mail describes is a fraction of the overall benefits system. These 190 households sit alongside 1.35 million other households where at least one parent claims an out of work benefit.

Ally Fogg in the Guardian points out that the £11 million that these families receive, constitutes less than one hundredth of 1% of the total benefits bill of £100bn (excluding pensions).

The cost to us…the taxpayer? Small change.

The Express tries to score come political points with it’s analysis that we now have a ‘powerful incentive’ for people to have more children.

This ‘powerful incentive’ the Express describes is referring to child benefit. This currently stands at just £20.30 a week for your first child and then an additional £13.40 a week for any further children you have.

To put this into context. Krishna News in Churchdown paid me more money per week for doing a paper round than Heather Frost gets for each of her additional children.

Additionally, two of her children are between 16 and 20 so she would only receive child benefit if they are still in full time education. Her oldest child is now 21 so is not eligible for child benefit.

Who needs facts when you write for the Express though? Little inconvenient facts like the average reproduction rate of 1.9 children for families on benefit. The almost identical reproduction rate to those not on benefits.

If there is a ‘powerful incentive’ to have children on benefits (which there isn’t) then those on benefits have yet to spot it.

Ah, but she is having a brand new £400,000 house built for her and her ‘brood’ The Sun reports. Well, keep reading and in paragraph 7 of that same story it explains how Tewksbury Council could afford this. It states, “Tewkesbury Borough Council sold a plot of land…to Severn Vale Housing association…A condition of the sale was that one of the 15 affordable properties they built on the site would be a six-bedroom home”.

The penny drops. When The Sun quotes Robert Oxley from the TaxPayers Alliance saying, “It’s scandalous that so much time and money is being spent on one custom-built house” he doesn’t actually say whether or not it is ‘tax payer’s money’ that is being spent.

These stories fuel a hatred for some of the poorest families in Britain. Regardless of how many times tabloids but the word ‘struggling’ mockingly in inverted commas, it won’t effect the fact that 1 in 5 Brits live in poverty and are struggling.

These stories though act as smokescreens. They force us to focus on how the poor are costing us rather than how poverty is costing all of us.

11 responses to “An unemployed mother, 11 children and a council ‘eco-mansion’ – the true cost to society”

At last some common sense. @Russell Gowers – no the misunderstanding is yours. Housing associations build homes to rent. That is their reason for existence. Local authorities can nominate tenants, but that is it.

Good article! Glad to see not everyone out there is a traitor to their class (the 99%). All those who claim they are “working hard to pay for dole scroungers” or words to that effect, remember, predominantly you’re working for the idle rich, not the so-called idle poor (is bringing up 11 children not hard work anyway?)/

I think that the British Tax Payer should be more upset that our puppet government and cronies siphon off Tax Payers money into buying second homes, paying off their mortgages and for their extravagant lifestyles? not forgetting our nazi queen and her inbred lot living a lifestyle we could all but dream about – all on tax payers money too! makes people on benefit who get all the flak and blame in the corporate mass media seem inconsequential – get your priorities right sheeple!

Also (and not trying to pick holes here) the data in that JRF report you quote is rather suspect, to my eyes at least. They draw a definition of “child poverty” which is wildly different from that of the official definition (£100 per week gross household income vs. £183 per week net of rent/mortgage, water, council tax) and then extrapolate their results to include all children in poverty. If one takes as a hypothesis that the poorer a child’s family, the greater risk of future GDP erosion will be, then we can see that picking the bottom half of the “poverty” definition will lead to exaggerated results in comparison with assessing a more normalised sample.

Not a comment on the general sentiment but I think you’ve misunderstood the housebuilding situation. If Tewkesbury Borough Council sold the plot on the condition that a large house were to be built, they surely have to buy or lease that same house back, in order to supply it to the lady – using those ever-controversial tax pounds. So TPA aren’t completely barking up the wrong tree.